“Marcus used to hang out with my brother a lot at school,” I say cautiously. “Honestly, I’m not sure he’s your type. I’ll, um, point him out to you at school sometime.”
“Huh,” Izzy says again. “Why would he even know who I am? Maybe he’s being nice to me because he knows I’m your friend.”
I would like nothing more than for this to be true, but I can’t fool myself into thinking it is. “Yeah, maybe so.”
“Or maybe it wasn’t even from him.” She looks like she wants to say more, but then hesitates. “Do the cards say anything about it?” She nods at the spread of tarot on the carpet. The smile on the sphinx perched above the Wheel of Fortune suddenly looks like Marcus’s grin, and I run my hands through the cards, scrambling them, then gathering them into a messy pile and sweeping them into my bag.
“The cards are confusing right now,” I say. “Maybe we can try again later.”
We work half-heartedly on the Physics homework for a while. Izzy’s good at this stuff, I can tell, but she seems distracted, and I am, too, and the work stretches on for longer than it should, until finally she says that she promised to make dinner for her family and she needs to start cooking, and I decide to use the opportunity to exit.
“I’ll walk you out,” she says.
I go out the door first, so I’m the first one to see them. Marcus and T are on the sidewalk at the end of Izzy’s short driveway. It seems as if they were standing there talking about something rather than simply walking past. They both look up at me. No, that’s not right; they look past me. To Izzy.
“Tristan,” Izzy says, coming out to stand beside me on the porch. It takes me a beat to realize that she’s talking about T, because no one uses his real name. Then I remember that weird moment before Physics class a few days ago when she stared at him in the hallway.
Marcus shoves T’s shoulder and, kind of like a puppet whose string has been jerked, T says, “Oh, hey, Izzy. We were… we were coming by to say hey.” They walk toward us, and I sidle up to Izzy, the points of a quadrilateral drawing closer, four corners of the earth folding together. “Hi, Brianna,” T adds as an afterthought.
“Hey, Caballito,” Marcus says, but he’s still staring at Izzy, seeming very pleased.
T looks as anxious and miserable about this situation as I feel. “Um, Izzy, I don’t think you’ve met my cousin Marcus yet.”
“Your cousin?” Izzy says.
“Yeah, me and T, we’re almost like brothers, you know?” Marcus says, reaching out to shake Izzy’s hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“You sent me a book?” Izzy asks.
Marcus does a head-tipped-downward bashful thing. I’ve been watching him use that same gesture around girls since he was nine years old. He still hasn’t let go of her hand, I notice. “Hey, you got it. T told me you might like it. But what we were talking about,” he continues, “is that there’s this party. You might not have heard about it yet, being new to the block and all. But you shouldn’t miss this party, Izzy. She shouldn’t miss it, right, T?”
“Right,” T says.
“What kind of party?” Izzy asks, taking back her hand.
“Are you talking about R. J.’s party?” I ask.
“Yeah, see, Brianna knows what’s up,” Marcus says, smiling at me.
“We should all go together,” I blurt out, almost before I know it’s in my head. R. J.’s is a notorious hookup fest, and I can think of few things worse than watching Marcus put the moves on Izzy all night long, but maybe I can think of a way to put the whole thing on ice before next weekend.
“Yeah, sure,” Marcus says smoothly. “We can all go together. How’s that sound, T?” Marcus puts his fists up, shadowboxes T in a joking way, left-right, left-right.
“Sure, sounds good,” T says, but he looks at Izzy as he does, not Marcus, and she looks back at him, and that’s when I see the whole picture, a vision gift from the spirits. The sight line between their eyes is a fuse burning from both ends, and their bodies are giving off heat and light, two stars. The heat is so intense, in fact, that it inflates a helium balloon of relief in me, and I wonder how I possibly could have missed it before, but Marcus doesn’t see it at all.
“It’s settled, then,” he says. “You ladies enjoy your beautiful Saturday, a’ight?” Then they turn around and head back toward the sidewalk, even though T looks like he might wither when he breaks eye contact with Izzy.
“Well, that was strange,” I say when they’re out of earshot, though it’s obviously the understatement of the year.
“Yes,” Izzy agrees. She hadn’t bothered to put on shoes, and now she’s shifting around on the concrete in her socked feet. The breeze ruffles her hair, and she looks like she came here from a different age, like she sailed in at the prow of a ship.
“You didn’t tell me you had a crush on T.” She doesn’t say anything in response, but her face looks cracked open with embarrassment, maybe even fear. “It’s okay,” I say, sliding my arm around her waist and squeezing. “I have an idea.”
THE QUEEN
THE PARTY: WE SAILED TOWARD IT ON THE SLOW-MOVING river of the week, peering at it through telescopes, trying to anticipate and map its contours, making plans long before we landed. If any of the others—Marcus, Tristan, Brianna—managed to think of anything besides the party that week, they were doing better than I was.
After Marcus invited us to the party, after I tried to read the truth about the book of poetry in Tristan’s face, I dragged Brianna back inside the house and told her everything about my brother and Tristan. I even broached the subject that I’d been dreading, which is that I suspected Hull had been at least partially responsible for her brother crossing paths with the police. After muttering something about shoes that didn’t make much sense, she told me I shouldn’t worry about it. In fact, it seemed like a weight had been lifted from her own shoulders. “Guys in this neighborhood get in fights sometimes,” she said, waving it off. “It’s best to stay out of it and live your own life.” Easier said than done, but I could see where she was coming from. Hull hadn’t been thinking of me when he went to that chess match; why did I have to think of him, then, when I was deciding whom to be friends with?
The rest of what Brianna said sounded batshit crazy, to be honest, but my heart wanted it to be true when she told me that Tristan was avoiding me because he wouldn’t move in on anything Marcus wanted for himself. Surely part of Brianna’s conjecture had to be mistaken: The coolest guy at our high school was not obsessed with me. But if Tristan even thought this outlandish idea might be true, well… maybe that was why he had cooled toward me after those first blissful encounters. The mere suggestion that it was Marcus, a complete stranger, who was to blame for my troubles left me with a flicker of relief and hope.
“I have a plan,” Brianna told me. “There’s a way we can find out if he’s into you without pissing off his cousin. And you won’t have to deal with Marcus coming on to you at the party. It’s all going to work out, lady. Trust me.”
As Brianna talked through her plan, it didn’t escape me that she pretty obviously had a thing for Marcus. But, so what? It was possible that this was the best way for everyone to get what he or she wanted. I turned her insane plot over in my mind while I chopped onions and garlic, and by the time the enchiladas were done and I heard Mom and Hull coming up the front walk, I’d decided that I would go along with it.
In order to lay the groundwork for Brianna’s plan, I gave up keeping my distance from Tristan. On Monday, when I sat behind him in AP Literature class, he seemed bewildered, understandably wary.
“Is this reserved for the Anne Bradstreet fan club?” I asked, smiling to cover my own nerves.
He paused, and I saw his face cycle rapidly through a dozen possible reactions—apologetic, distant, suspicious. But then it settled into that sweet, genuine smile that I came to crave.
“Yep,” he said. “It is now.”
Even now, I sometimes struggle to put my
finger on what exactly it was about him that made me temporarily lose my mind. Normally, as someone comes into clearer focus, you’re able to see all his imperfections, but with Tristan it was the opposite. The more I was around him, the more tiny perfections I could discern. The way he looked at me and listened, really listened, while I was saying something, rather than thinking about the next thing he was going to say. The way he shrugged bashfully when I asked him how he learned to play chess, though I knew even then that he must have been good to beat Hull. The way he could (provided I wasn’t picking fights with him) flip the tenor of a conversation with such a gentle touch, turn everything to lightness again. That same day, after the bell rang, we walked into the hallway, and I was complaining about my mother, which is an easy fallback topic when you’re the new kid. I was telling him that I had inherited my terrible singing voice from her but that at least I knew I had and didn’t sing U2 songs so loudly in the shower that everyone in the kitchen below could hear every milk-curdling note, and every time I grumbled about it, she got a faraway look and talked about how she was certain that Bono had made eye contact with her during a concert in 1987.
“Tell me your mom does stuff like that,” I pleaded. “Tell me I’m not alone here.”
“My mom is dead,” he said, as simply as if he’d said, “The sky is blue.”
My mouth gaped open stupidly. I wanted to run to the fire alarm that was on the wall and pull it, just so I could escape. But Tristan said, “It’s okay. It was a long time ago. As for whether my mother would have seduced Bono, I’m really not sure.”
“Honestly, it’s hard to imagine anyone besides my delusional mother attempting it.”
“Don’t be so hard on your mom. She raised you, so she’s all right by me.” Then he smiled, and we parted ways, and the thought of Tristan the Perfect made the knot of desire draw tight again, made me bite my lip so hard on the way to Government class that it started to bleed.
In short, I was more in love with him every day, but I worked to keep things friendly and polite, very controlled. A more truthful version of my feelings would be revealed at the party. Or I would chicken out and nothing at all would be revealed. By then, Brianna and I had a full and detailed plan, one that was bold and dizzyingly complicated and a tiny bit brilliant, and I wanted with every cell of my body for the whole thing to work, but every day I vacillated wildly between optimistic confidence and desperate fear of failure, and I was forever on the verge of calling the whole thing off.
As for Marcus, he couldn’t have been nicer to me. I didn’t have any classes with him, but every time I saw him in the hallway, he stopped whatever he was doing and smiled and hugged me, asked me how my day was going. I won’t lie: It made my heart beat faster to be pressed against the hard, muscled planes of his chest, and it was a high unto itself to hear the whispers that rippled all around me as soon as Marcus began showering me with attention. I could easily understand why Brianna had fallen for him hard. And yet… the way he looked at me reminded me of the way that some of Mom’s clients examined her jewelry before making a big purchase: appraising its value, searching carefully for a flaw.
Don’t borrow trouble, I told myself. It would be like me to bask in the smile of the coolest kid in the school while secretly interpreting his actions as a harbinger of doom. “My little pragmatist,” my mother used to call me.
All of this scheming and calculation distracted me from something I probably could have seen coming had I put any time into thinking about it. That Friday, my parents told me that after Hull finished his final upcoming week of the full-time therapy program, they would allow him to go back to Hope Springs Day School and finish out his remaining two years there. Not a huge surprise, but still, it bothered me. Never had my twin seemed so distant, so unreachable. He didn’t even tell me himself; he was up in his room while my parents cooked dinner together and I did homework at the kitchen counter. Even though I knew this was the one thing Hull had wanted ever since my parents told us we were moving to Brooklyn, it seemed bizarre to me when my father made me the same offer, to return to Hope Springs. Sagan High was big, noisy, and sometimes overwhelming. There were a few tough, scary characters there, the food was terrible, and a lot of the facilities looked like they’d been built four decades ago, because they had been. And yet, I liked it. Hope Springs was like a fuzzy sweater, with its self-directed learning and familiar faces, but a sweater that I’d now outgrown. My schedule at Sagan was a workout, full as it was with AP classes, and I liked it that way. And there was Tristan, of course. It was odd to consider how little I cared about something that meant the world to Hull.
“No,” I said. “I’m fine where I am.”
“Thank God,” Dad said, aggressively hacking into a head of broccoli. “Because we can’t afford it, anyway. But, you know, we had to ask.”
I usually require a half hour to get ready to leave the house, and that includes showering. It’s sort of a point of pride for me. But that Saturday, the day of the party, I took extra care. I borrowed a flowing, layered skirt from my mom’s closet. It had a fuchsia-and-orange pattern that I’d always liked, and it looked like something Brianna might pick out, plus I knew my mom wouldn’t miss it since her closet was the kind of exploding mess in which articles often got lost for two or three years. This I paired with a tight T-shirt that I would wear under a sweater on a typical day. I pinned my hair up into a bun, and put on more eyeliner than usual and berry-colored lipstick, which I normally don’t even bother with since I have a bad habit of biting my lips when I’m concentrating on schoolwork. I was examining my work in the bathroom mirror, making sure it was exactly as Brianna and I had discussed, when Hull barged in without knocking.
“Um, hello? I could be naked in here. Learn some manners.”
Instead of turning around and leaving me alone, Hull stood in the doorway and narrowed his eyes at me. “What are you up to? You look totally different.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do. You look like a low-rent flamenco dancer.”
I’d thought I looked nice, actually—at worst like a talented flamenco dancer—and the comment chafed. Besides, his hangdog skulking about the house was seeming more and more like a put-on, like a carefully calibrated performance of hardship rather than the thing itself.
“Well, you’re looking more like your old self. Especially after manipulating Mom and Dad into giving you what you wanted.”
“You don’t know what you’re—”
“Oh, save it, Hull,” I said, shoving past him out of the bathroom.
“They’re not your friends,” he said, and the remark made me stop and look back at him.
“Who?”
“Whomever you’re going to meet. They don’t know the first thing about you. They’re looking for ways to take advantage of you.” What was twisting his face like that? Jealousy? Anger?
“Why do you always have to expect the worst of everyone?”
“Why do you always have to be so naive?” he asked, following me down the hall. “People haven’t evolved to be cuddly teddy bears, and that goes for you, too, even though you like to pretend otherwise.”
“You’re so sad,” I said, and shut my bedroom door like a period on the statement. I started gathering some things into my purse, pretending Hull couldn’t get to me. But I felt shaky. How well did I know Tristan, or even Brianna? Not very well. We’d known everyone at Hope Springs for most of our lives, and I experienced a moment of acute longing to be going to the movies with Philip or getting pizza with the girls from my old Girl Scout troop or, really, doing anything that didn’t involve a party full of strangers. But this is the new normal, I thought while I put on some perfume that had been collecting dust on my bureau since we moved, and I better learn to adapt to it.
We had plans to meet on the corner of our block at 9:00 PM, but I was so nervous about being the first person there and having to stand by myself like a loser that I stalled for too long, and the
n all three of them were there waiting for me, watching me jog toward them on heels that were higher than I was used to. There was a moment, when I lurched to a stop, breathing hard, that I was certain they would laugh at me and tell me they were kidding, that I couldn’t come with them after all. No room in the club.
“You look fantastic,” Brianna said. “Muy guapa, mami.” I could tell from the loosey-goosey nature of her movements that she’d already been drinking, which wasn’t what we’d planned, but I was relieved that this was all real, that I was wanted. When she hugged me and breathed whiskey fumes into my face, I laughed out loud. No one at Hope Springs Day School was having a Saturday night like this one. I had a posse, unlikely as it was, and we would all live happily ever after. In that moment, I was sure of it.
“Yeah,” Marcus said. “Brianna always knows what’s up.” It was dark already, but his white teeth glowed as if illuminated from the inside. Tristan stole a couple indirect glances at me, and then dropped the end of a joint on the sidewalk and ground it out with the toe of his sneaker.
“Time to go,” he said.
There was a twenty-minute walk ahead of us, but we’d barely started it when Brianna rummaged around in her purse and produced two innocuous-looking soda bottles, one dark, one clear.
“This one’s got whiskey in it, so I brought it for T and Izzy to share,” she said, thrusting the bottle into my hand. “I know you like gin better, so this one’s for you,” she said to Marcus, tossing the clear one up in the air for him to catch.
I tried to make eye contact with Brianna. We’d talked about not drinking too much so that we could pull off the switch. But she was singing a song in Spanish, accenting the beat with the clicks of her high-heeled sandals, and Marcus was smiling at her, taking long pulls from the bottle. The night was already taking on a nice bacchanalian blur, so I didn’t hesitate too long before I dropped back to walk beside Tristan on the sidewalk and twisted off the cap. It didn’t taste like whiskey. It tasted more like autumn leaves and ground mold and something else, the barest tang of hot metal. It made me cough and choke for a second. I offered the bottle to Tristan.
Izzy + Tristan Page 9